I posted earlier about the development process, trying to express some ideas that have been floating around the office regarding how buildings are financed, designed, and built.  What was lacking from that post was any consideration of what happens once the building has been built.  As builders, architects tend to think of buildings as artifacts, objects to be photographed and admired.  This approach ignores the reality that architecture is an element in the dynamic process of human society.

Stepping back to consider architecture as a process allows us to consider a much wider variety of concerns; the lifetime cost of building maintenance, the environmental impact of powering the building, the cultural flows that the building mediates, etc.  Let me touch on a couple such topics before getting into any ideas about how things might be improved.

One of the biggest shocks I had after graduating from architecture school and working in an office was that architects don’t generally work at the same scale as we’re trained to in school.  My design eduction emphasized creatively approaching a site and considering what mix of uses would be appropriate, investigating demographic trends, exploring how architecture can influence cultural development, and proposing new types of build environments.  It quickly became clear that most architectural firms do little or none of that; they are hired essentially to provide window-dressing for a project which is dictated primarily by either a developer’s market analysis or an institution’s project brief.  While there are plenty of counter-examples, the majority of buildings seem to be built in a system in which the architect is not the primary decision-maker as to what should be built.

The development ecosystem has become defined by a couple primary actors; clients, developers, investors, institutions, builders and regulatory agencies.  Decisions as to what should be built is made by these actors, then architects and engineers are commissioned to implement these decisions.  I see a lot of benefits to this ecosystem, it is good at responding to market forces, partitions risk to appropriate parties, and works well in the free-market economy.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t do a great job of addressing objectives which are not easily monetized; coherent communities, sustainable building practices, innovation and others.  My feeling is that to change the outcomes of development, we must first change the ecosystem in which development occurs.

After reading and discussing Tom’s post, I thought I’d throw out some more ideas.  I think the biggest challenge to start with is developing a coherent message about how we think the country should go about addressing the ‘green revolution’

Charles Perrow published an interesting book called ‘Normal Accidents‘, which is an anthropological study of catastrophe.  He argues that all systems fail given enough time and that to reduce the frequency and severity of catasrophes we must address the systems which fail (rather than blaming actors in such systems, ie blame the people).  His basic argument is that there are two fundamental factors which influence the probability of a system failure: the complexity of the system and the interconnectedness of the system. Complexity here refers to non-linear causation chains; a complex system is one in which a cause cannot be clearly determined by observing an effect.  Interconnectedness refers to the degree of coordination required between components of a system.  He argues that as complexity and interconnectedness increase, the probability of failure must also increase.

After reading Tom’s post and thinking about it a little, I started to wonder what would be the best way to go about participating in the recent spirit of change.  The traditional way to do this is to join a PAC or an industry group or give money to representatives in hopes of securing some access.  But that was before the internet.

Lawrence Lessig is a professor at Stanford, and has been one of the guiding influences in the copyleft movement.  He’s recently stopped working on intellectual property issues (he hates that term btw) and has started focusing on the influence of money on politics (a nice way of saying pervasive corruption).  His primary tools of influence?  Web pages.

His first page is Change Congress, a home base of sorts for people interested in dealing with the corruption issue.  It’s mostly a quick way for people to register their support, make dontations and get their representative’s contact info.

More recently, he’s started OpenGovernment.org, which seems to be aimed at persuading the new administration to use technology to open the governing process to the public as much as possible.

Obama’s campaign itself has been an excellent example of how the internet can facilitate grassroots movements – it was designed to be highly interactive and to facilitate irl meetings between supporters while providing easily accessible information regarding ‘the cause’.  After the election he put up the cleverly named Change.gov which I haven’t spent much time looking over, but seems to be an attempt to transform the vibrant campaign web community into some form of governing community.

So where am I going with all this?  The internet provides an ideal method to integrate advocacy, petitioning, community organizing and fundraising.  If we can develop a concise and attractive message, it should be extremely easy to get that message out.  Why limit ourselves to local representatives when we can work at multiple scales simultaneously?